The Making of Species 



their wives, nor do they refuse to mate with 

 very tall or very short women." As regards 

 eye-colour, Pearson seems to have arrived at 

 somewhat more definite results. " We con- 

 clude," he writes (p. 428), "that in mankind 

 there certainly exists a preferential mating in the 

 matter of eye-colour, or of some closely allied 

 character in the male ; in the case of the female 

 there also appears to be some change of type due 

 to preferential mating. . . . The general tendency 

 is for lighter-eyed to mate, the darker-eyed being 

 relatively less frequently mated." 



But Pearson's experiments seem to show that 

 as regards stature and eye-colour there is "a 

 quite sensible tendency of like to mate with 

 like." "In fact," writes Pearson, "husband and 

 wife for one of these characters are more alike 

 than uncle and niece, and for the other more 

 alike than first cousins." He adds, " Such a 

 degree of resemblance in two mates, which we 

 reasonably assume to be not peculiar to man, 

 could not fail to be of weight if all the stages 

 between like and unlike were destroyed by 

 differential selection." 



Two obvious criticisms of the results obtained 

 by Prof. Pearson occur to us. The first is that 

 his conclusions do not seem to be in accordance 

 with the popular notion that fair-haired men 

 prefer dark hair in a woman, while dark-haired 

 men prefer fair-haired women, and vice versa. 



310 



